John Seed interviews painter Israel Hershberg about his work on the occasion of the exhibition Israel Hershberg: Fields of Vision at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, on view through February 4, 2013.

Hershberg remarks: "There is a quality, an essential concrete experience that I wish very much to transmit, but in its various formational stages, I take whatever liberties are necessary for the painting. My finished pictures are not a document of the thing observed — I'd like them to be a new nature, a registration, if you will, of experience as opposed to record. They must be, first and foremost, paintings. When I am painting a landscape, it's not the nature which captivates me. When looking at a landscape I consider it just as I would any other motif; it's seen through an imposed particularized lens, an accumulated corpus of painterly pictorial desires I have amassed, like the amassing of barnacles on an old ship's hull, it becomes an archetype and one with its own eco-system."